Build RAG with Milvus and Fireworks AI

Fireworks AI is a generative AI inference platform offering industry-leading speed and production-readiness for running and customizing models. Fireworks AI provides a variety of generative AI services, including serverless models, on-demand deployments, and fine-tuning capabilities. It offers a comprehensive environment for deploying various AI models, including large language models (LLMs) and embedding models. Fireworks AI aggregates numerous models, enabling users to easily access and utilize these resources without the need for extensive infrastructure setup.

In this tutorial, we will show you how to build a RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) pipeline with Milvus and Fireworks AI.

Preparation

Dependencies and Environment

$ pip install --upgrade pymilvus openai requests tqdm

Fireworks AI enables the OpenAI-style API. You can login to its official website and prepare the api key FIREWORKS_API_KEY as an environment variable.

import os

os.environ["FIREWORKS_API_KEY"] = "***********"

Prepare the data

We use the FAQ pages from the Milvus Documentation 2.4.x as the private knowledge in our RAG, which is a good data source for a simple RAG pipeline.

Download the zip file and extract documents to the folder milvus_docs.

$ wget https://github.com/milvus-io/milvus-docs/releases/download/v2.4.6-preview/milvus_docs_2.4.x_en.zip
$ unzip -q milvus_docs_2.4.x_en.zip -d milvus_docs

We load all markdown files from the folder milvus_docs/en/faq. For each document, we just simply use "# " to separate the content in the file, which can roughly separate the content of each main part of the markdown file.

from glob import glob

text_lines = []

for file_path in glob("milvus_docs/en/faq/*.md", recursive=True):
    with open(file_path, "r") as file:
        file_text = file.read()

    text_lines += file_text.split("# ")

Prepare the LLM and Embedding Model

We initialize a client to prepare the LLM and embedding model. Fireworks AI enables the OpenAI-style API, and you can use the same API with minor adjustments to call the embedding model and the LLM.

from openai import OpenAI

fireworks_client = OpenAI(
    api_key=os.environ["FIREWORKS_API_KEY"],
    base_url="https://api.fireworks.ai/inference/v1",
)

Define a function to generate text embeddings using the client. We use the nomic-ai/nomic-embed-text-v1.5 model as an example.

def emb_text(text):
    return (
        fireworks_client.embeddings.create(
            input=text, model="nomic-ai/nomic-embed-text-v1.5"
        )
        .data[0]
        .embedding
    )

Generate a test embedding and print its dimension and first few elements.

test_embedding = emb_text("This is a test")
embedding_dim = len(test_embedding)
print(embedding_dim)
print(test_embedding[:10])

768
[0.04815673828125, 0.0261993408203125, -0.1749267578125, -0.03131103515625, 0.068115234375, -0.00621795654296875, 0.03955078125, -0.0210723876953125, 0.039703369140625, -0.0286102294921875]

Load data into Milvus

Create the Collection

from pymilvus import MilvusClient

milvus_client = MilvusClient(uri="./milvus_demo.db")

collection_name = "my_rag_collection"

Check if the collection already exists and drop it if it does.

if milvus_client.has_collection(collection_name):
    milvus_client.drop_collection(collection_name)

Create a new collection with specified parameters.

If we don’t specify any field information, Milvus will automatically create a default id field for primary key, and a vector field to store the vector data. A reserved JSON field is used to store non-schema-defined fields and their values.

milvus_client.create_collection(
    collection_name=collection_name,
    dimension=embedding_dim,
    metric_type="IP",  # Inner product distance
    consistency_level="Strong",  # Strong consistency level
)

Insert data

Iterate through the text lines, create embeddings, and then insert the data into Milvus.

Here is a new field text, which is a non-defined field in the collection schema. It will be automatically added to the reserved JSON dynamic field, which can be treated as a normal field at a high level.

from tqdm import tqdm

data = []

for i, line in enumerate(tqdm(text_lines, desc="Creating embeddings")):
    data.append({"id": i, "vector": emb_text(line), "text": line})

milvus_client.insert(collection_name=collection_name, data=data)

Creating embeddings: 100%|██████████| 72/72 [00:28<00:00,  2.51it/s]





{'insert_count': 72, 'ids': [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71], 'cost': 0}

Build RAG

Retrieve data for a query

Let’s specify a frequent question about Milvus.

question = "How is data stored in milvus?"

Search for the question in the collection and retrieve the semantic top-3 matches.

search_res = milvus_client.search(
    collection_name=collection_name,
    data=[
        emb_text(question)
    ],  # Use the `emb_text` function to convert the question to an embedding vector
    limit=3,  # Return top 3 results
    search_params={"metric_type": "IP", "params": {}},  # Inner product distance
    output_fields=["text"],  # Return the text field
)

Let’s take a look at the search results of the query

import json

retrieved_lines_with_distances = [
    (res["entity"]["text"], res["distance"]) for res in search_res[0]
]
print(json.dumps(retrieved_lines_with_distances, indent=4))

[
    [
        " Where does Milvus store data?\n\nMilvus deals with two types of data, inserted data and metadata. \n\nInserted data, including vector data, scalar data, and collection-specific schema, are stored in persistent storage as incremental log. Milvus supports multiple object storage backends, including [MinIO](https://min.io/), [AWS S3](https://aws.amazon.com/s3/?nc1=h_ls), [Google Cloud Storage](https://cloud.google.com/storage?hl=en#object-storage-for-companies-of-all-sizes) (GCS), [Azure Blob Storage](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/storage/blobs), [Alibaba Cloud OSS](https://www.alibabacloud.com/product/object-storage-service), and [Tencent Cloud Object Storage](https://www.tencentcloud.com/products/cos) (COS).\n\nMetadata are generated within Milvus. Each Milvus module has its own metadata that are stored in etcd.\n\n###",
        0.8334928750991821
    ],
    [
        "How does Milvus flush data?\n\nMilvus returns success when inserted data are loaded to the message queue. However, the data are not yet flushed to the disk. Then Milvus' data node writes the data in the message queue to persistent storage as incremental logs. If `flush()` is called, the data node is forced to write all data in the message queue to persistent storage immediately.\n\n###",
        0.746377170085907
    ],
    [
        "What is the maximum dataset size Milvus can handle?\n\n  \nTheoretically, the maximum dataset size Milvus can handle is determined by the hardware it is run on, specifically system memory and storage:\n\n- Milvus loads all specified collections and partitions into memory before running queries. Therefore, memory size determines the maximum amount of data Milvus can query.\n- When new entities and and collection-related schema (currently only MinIO is supported for data persistence) are added to Milvus, system storage determines the maximum allowable size of inserted data.\n\n###",
        0.7328270673751831
    ]
]

Use LLM to get a RAG response

Convert the retrieved documents into a string format.

context = "\n".join(
    [line_with_distance[0] for line_with_distance in retrieved_lines_with_distances]
)

Define system and user prompts for the Lanage Model. This prompt is assembled with the retrieved documents from Milvus.

SYSTEM_PROMPT = """
Human: You are an AI assistant. You are able to find answers to the questions from the contextual passage snippets provided.
"""
USER_PROMPT = f"""
Use the following pieces of information enclosed in <context> tags to provide an answer to the question enclosed in <question> tags.
<context>
{context}
</context>
<question>
{question}
</question>
"""

Use the llama-v3p1-405b-instruct model provided by Fireworks to generate a response based on the prompts.

response = fireworks_client.chat.completions.create(
    model="accounts/fireworks/models/llama-v3p1-405b-instruct",
    messages=[
        {"role": "system", "content": SYSTEM_PROMPT},
        {"role": "user", "content": USER_PROMPT},
    ],
)
print(response.choices[0].message.content)

According to the provided context, Milvus stores data in two ways:

1. Inserted data, including vector data, scalar data, and collection-specific schema, are stored in persistent storage as incremental logs. This can be done using multiple object storage backends such as MinIO, AWS S3, Google Cloud Storage, Azure Blob Storage, Alibaba Cloud OSS, and Tencent Cloud Object Storage.
2. Metadata, which are generated within Milvus, are stored in etcd, with each Milvus module having its own metadata.

Additionally, when data is inserted, it is first loaded into a message queue, and then written to persistent storage as incremental logs by the data node. The `flush()` function can be used to force the data node to write all data in the message queue to persistent storage immediately.

Great! We have successfully built a RAG pipeline with Milvus and Fireworks AI.